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As AI Strains the Grid, R-Zero Cuts Building HVAC Energy 20 to 40 Percent

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R-Zero’s Physical AI platform uses real-time occupancy to reduce ventilation energy in existing buildings, with no capital investment and savings verified against utility bills.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — As AI compute demand strains power grids and drives operating costs higher across every sector, data centers accounted for approximately 1.5% of global electricity in 2024, according to analysis from the Brookings Institution, with demand growing significantly faster than overall electricity consumption. Fortune 500 technology companies, major telecommunications providers, Ivy League institutions, and nationally ranked healthcare systems are turning to R-Zero. The Physical AI platform for buildings is cutting HVAC energy use by 20 to 40 percent without retrofits, capital investment, or operational disruption.

Most commercial buildings still run HVAC on fixed schedules or indirect signals like CO2, with ventilation sized for a peak occupancy that rarely occurs. Average peak occupancy across commercial buildings is roughly 50 percent, and HVAC accounts for about 40 percent of a building’s total energy use. The result is systematic over-conditioning of empty and under-occupied space, hour after hour.

R-Zero closes that gap by putting intelligence in the building’s control loop, without any new HVAC equipment or rewiring. The platform senses live occupancy across every floor, zone, and air handler, interprets how each space is actually being used, and continuously determines how much ventilation it needs minute to minute, communicating directly with the building’s existing control system. When a zone empties, the system automatically dials back airflow to a certified low-energy mode, also known as ASHRAE-compliant Occupied Standby, then ramps back up the moment people return. The same intelligence runs across an entire portfolio, learning each building’s patterns, constantly adjusting to how the building is actually being used, holding comfort inside defined guardrails, and catching inefficiencies before they show up on the energy bill.

“Buildings are one of the largest sources of controllable energy waste, and most still run as if every room is full,” said Jennifer Nuckles, CEO of R-Zero. “We turn real-time occupancy into control decisions inside the existing building system, so the savings show up in the financial reporting, not just on a dashboard. That is what physical AI looks like when it operates infrastructure instead of describing it.”

Verified Results

At a nationally ranked children’s hospital system, R-Zero deployed its platform across a 521,000-square-foot facility where ventilation had previously operated at fixed levels regardless of occupancy. The following results were measured against a pre-project baseline using IPMVP methodology:

30 percent reduction in HVAC energy use23,000 kWh saved9.72 metric tons of CO2 avoided72 percent reduction in excess airflow during low-occupancy periods66 percent of operating hours in a certified low-energy ventilation mode or ASHRAE-compliant Occupied Standby modeZero impact on occupant comfort: 100% of occupants reported temperature satisfaction

Adoption and Recognition

Most building operators know they are over-conditioning space. The barrier has never been awareness; it has been the capital commitment, operational complexity, and risk of replacing working infrastructure to fix it. R-Zero removes all three.

Commercial buildings account for approximately 30% of U.S. energy consumption, and HVAC is often the single largest controllable operating expense. As utilities and regulators look for ways to reduce grid strain without building new generation capacity, optimizing existing building infrastructure has become an increasingly attractive source of demand reduction.

The platform is gaining traction across building types where HVAC spend is high and occupancy is variable: non-clinical healthcare facilities, higher education campuses, corporate offices, and large commercial real estate portfolios. R-Zero is offered through a shared-savings model with no upfront cost, and fees are tied directly to verified savings measured against actual utility bills, removing the capital-approval barrier that stops most building intelligence projects from moving forward.

R-Zero’s approach earned ASHRAE Technology Awards at both the Golden Gate Chapter and Region X levels in the Healthcare/EBCx Building category, evaluated on measured field performance against a pre-project baseline rather than vendor claims.

To learn more about R-Zero’s Physical AI, visit rzero.com/audit.

About R-Zero

R-Zero is the Physical AI platform for buildings. The platform uses real-time occupancy intelligence to operate existing building systems, reducing HVAC energy by 20 to 40 percent, lowering OpEx, and supporting NOI without capital investment, operational disruption, or added burden on facilities teams. R-Zero integrates with existing BMS infrastructure over BACnet and delivers verified savings measured against actual energy bills using IPMVP methodology. R-Zero has raised a total of $170 million to date, with backing from La Caisse, Mayo Clinic Ventures, World Innovation Lab, John Doerr, and DBL Partners. Learn more at rzero.com.

MEDIA CONTACT BAM for R-Zero rzero@bambybig.agency

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JustAI Raises $17M Series A to Build an Agentic Marketing Platform

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New capital from investors Base10 Partners, Y Combinator, and Peak XV Partners, will
help JustAI scale its AI-native platform for enterprise marketing teams in the US

SAN FRANCISCO, June 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — JustAI, an AI-native marketing platform helping companies automate personalization, experimentation and decisioning at scale, today announced it has raised $17 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Base10 Partners, with participation from Y Combinator and Peak XV Partners.The round also includes strategic investors and operators from anthropic, Chime and Notion, the CTO of HubSpot, and the founders of Eppo and Vapi.

Marketing and growth teams are under increasing pressure to deliver more output, more personalization and more measurable impact, without scaling headcount or adding more tools. At the same time, the martech landscape has become increasingly fragmented. The 2025 Marketing Technology Landscape counted more than 15,000 martech products, while Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey found that CMOs are allocating 15.3% of marketing budgets to AI, but only 30% feel ready to scale AI capabilities.

JustAI grew 5X in its annual recurring revenue this year and has ambitious plans to disrupt how marketing is run in large enterprises. It brings together strategy, creative, decisioning and data agents to help marketers move from manual campaign execution to autonomous marketing. Instead of relying on rigid workflows, rules-based segmentation and scattered experimentation history, JustAI gives marketing teams a unified system that can understand user context, generate campaigns, optimize decisions and continuously learn from results.

“We want marketers to spend less time managing tools and more time making the decisions that drive growth,” said Neha Mittal, Founder and CEO of JustAI. “Marketing teams have spent the last decade buying more tools to manage more workflows. But the real opportunity with AI is not another dashboard or another automation layer. It is giving every great marketer the ability to operate with the leverage of an entire team. JustAI is the infrastructure for that shift.”

JustAI’s platform is organized around four coordinated agents:

The Strategy agent helps marketers audit users, segments and product surfaces.The Creative agent turns those insights into brand-forward messaging across channels such as email and in-app experiences.The Decisioning agent optimizes for business goals such as engagement, retention and revenue, while operating within marketer-defined guardrails.The Data agent continuously measures lift, surfaces insights and feeds learnings back into the system.

When describing how JustAI unlocked new capabilities at Coursera, Director of Marketing Vera Hui said: “It would have required a dev team in the past, wouldn’t have done it myself.” JustAI enables companies to predict the next best message or action for each user, replacing manual workflows and deterministic campaign logic with adaptive, AI-powered decisioning. Its infrastructure is designed to execute hundreds of sophisticated campaigns built by agents at scale while giving marketers visibility and control over the system.

JustAI was founded by Neha Mittal and Jeff Hara. Neha brings more than a decade of growth and retention experience from companies including Twitter and Pinterest, where she saw firsthand how difficult it was for marketing teams to personalize at scale using legacy tools. Jeff brings deep experience in machine learning and recommendation systems. Together, the founding team combines expertise across growth, infrastructure, creative and AI.

“JustAI is one of the few teams building a true decisioning and measurement layer for marketing teams that marketers have needed, and the traction backs it up: 5X ARR growth and over $100 million in customer revenue influenced last year. Neha and Jeff combine hard-won growth experience with deep ML depth, and we’re honored they chose us as partners for this round,” noted Rexhi Dollaku, General Partner at Base10 Partners.

The company will use the new funding to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams, deepen its agentic infrastructure, and extend the platform beyond consumer companies into e-commerce and B2B marketing use cases.

To get in touch with the JustAI team, reach out at team@justwords.ai.

About JustAI

JustAI is an AI-native marketing platform that helps companies personalize, experiment and optimize customer engagement at scale. Powered by reinforcement learning and agentic infrastructure, JustAI enables marketing teams to move beyond manual workflows and traditional A/B testing toward AI-first personalization. The company is based in San Francisco and works with high-growth enterprises across consumer, D2C, E-commerce and B2B markets.

About Base10 Partners

Founded by Adeyemi Ajao and TJ Nahigian, Base10 is a San Francisco-based venture capital fund investing in founders who believe purpose is key to profits and in companies that are automating sectors of the Real Economy. Through its program the Advancement Initiative, Base10 donates 50% of profits to underfunded colleges and universities to support financial aid and other key initiatives. Portfolio companies include Notion, Figma, Nubank, Stripe, Popmenu, Aurora Solar, and HappyRobot. Connect via base10.vc.

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Valtir and Omnisight Announce Exclusive Strategic Alliance to Advance Proactive Work Zone Safety

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ADDISON, Texas, June 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Valtir, LLC, based in Addison, Texas, and Omnisight, headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina, are proud to announce an exclusive strategic alliance that brings together two leaders with a shared mission: protecting roadway workers through smarter, more proactive technology.

Through this strategic alliance, Valtir will serve as the exclusive North American provider of the Omnisight FusionBLADE® platform for all Trailer and Truck-Mounted Attenuator (TMA) applications, bringing together Valtir’s trusted roadway safety expertise with Omnisight’s advanced AI-powered sensor fusion technology to elevate work zone protection across the industry.

Together, the strategic alliance establishes a new benchmark for TMA-based work zone safety solutions, one that combines physical protection with real-time intelligence.

A Strategic Alliance Built Around Worker Safety

For more than 50 years, Valtir has been a leading provider of roadway safety products, including truck-mounted attenuators, crash cushions, guardrail systems, barriers, and other critical roadside safety hardware. TMAs serve as the last line of defense, absorbing impact and protecting crews when errant vehicles enter a work zone.

Omnisight’s FusionBLADE® technology adds a new layer of protection by helping crews identify potential threats before they reach the attenuator.

Mounted directly onto a TMA, FusionBLADE® continuously monitors approaching traffic using AI-enabled HD video and HD3D radar analytics. The system evaluates vehicle speed, trajectory, lane position, and potential collision risk in real time, providing critical awareness when seconds matter most.

The result is a unified solution that transforms a proven physical safety platform into an intelligent work zone safety system capable of helping crews recognize risk before impact occurs.

“Our exclusive strategic alliance with Omnisight is a defining moment for work zone safety and for Valtir’s role in shaping it. FusionBLADE® transforms any TMA platform from a last line of defense into an active early warning system, giving roadside crews the awareness they need to potentially avoid an impact altogether. Valtir has always been the trusted name in TMA innovation, and as the exclusive North American provider of FusionBLADE® for TMA applications, we are proud to bring this technology to the entire industry, not just our own product line.” — Cecil Brown, Vice President of EAS & Steel Barrier Sales, Valtir.

Intelligence at the Edge, When It Matters Most

FusionBLADE® was designed specifically for the realities of live work zone operations.

The system processes data directly on the vehicle using edge computing technology, eliminating the need for off-site processing and enabling actionable alerts in less than 100 milliseconds.

Because the solution mounts directly onto existing TMA platforms, agencies and contractors can deploy the technology without modifying their attenuators or significantly changing field operations.

FusionBLADE® also automatically records and logs near-miss events, providing safety managers with valuable operational insights and documentation without creating additional workload for field personnel.

What makes the system unique is its ability to combine multiple safety functions into a single platform:

AI-enabled HD video analyticsHD3D radar detection and trackingSpeed monitoringIntrusion and collision-risk detectionAutomated video event captureNear-miss reporting and safety analytics

Rather than relying on separate cameras, DVRs, speed detection systems, and event recording equipment, agencies and contractors can deploy a single integrated solution purpose-built for work zone safety.

“This strategic alliance is about raising the standard for work zone safety,” said Chris McGarty, CEO of Omnisight. “Valtir has built a reputation as a leading provider dedicated to protecting roadway workers and motorists, and we are proud to collaborate with a company that shares our values and commitment to innovation. Together, we’re bringing advanced detection, real-time awareness, and actionable intelligence to work zones, helping transportation agencies move from reactive safety measures to proactive protection.”

From Reactive Protection to Proactive Awareness

Work zone fatalities and serious injuries remain among the transportation industry’s most persistent challenges. Traditional safety measures play an essential role in mitigating consequences when incidents occur, but they often provide little warning before a vehicle enters the work zone.

The Valtir and Omnisight strategic alliance is built around changing that reality. Both companies view this strategic alliance as a natural extension of their commitment to advancing transportation safety through practical, deployable innovation.

About Valtir

Valtir, LLC is a leading provider and global supplier of commercial highway safety products — including truck-mounted attenuators, crash cushions, guardrail, barriers, and more. For over 50 years, Valtir has pioneered the next generation of innovative safety solutions sold to more than 70 countries worldwide. For FusionBLADE® sales inquiries, please visit: https://tinyurl.com/Valtir-FusionBLADE

For Valtir media inquiries, please contact: 
Theresa Stultz
Theresa.Stultz@valtir.com
Valtir.com

About Omnisight

Omnisight develops AI-powered sensor fusion solutions purpose-built for transportation safety. The FusionBLADE® system represents Omnisight’s commitment to advancing worker protection through real-time intelligence, edge processing, and practical deployment in the field.

For Omnisight media inquiries, please contact: 
Julia Skladzinski 
Julia@omnisightusa.com
Omnisightusa.com

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PulsePoint Expands Omnichannel Intelligence with Ad Server Creative ID Reporting, Giving Marketers NPI-Level Visibility into Rotating Creatives

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NEWARK, N.J., June 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — PulsePoint, the leading healthcare marketing technology company, today launched Ad Server Creative ID Reporting, a new capability that connects ad server creative data to individual physician-level insights. This capability gives healthcare marketers something that hasn’t existed before: true granular visibility into the specific rotating creatives that performed best at the NPI level and the intelligence to act on it across their entire omnichannel strategy.

For brands running campaigns through ad servers like Google Campaign Manager 360, creative level data from the ad server has always lived in one place and physician-level data in another. With this new feature, marketers can connect the two, seeing which specific creative message was served to each individual HCP, even when multiple creatives are rotating within the same ad server placement. Combined with PulsePoint’s existing channel-level behavioral data, marketers can now optimize by both channel and creative simultaneously to understand not just where an HCP engages, but what message moves them on each channel.

Butler/Till, a leading healthcare marketing agency, and Salix Pharmaceuticals were early development partners in bringing Ad Server Creative ID Reporting to life. Both organizations were uniquely positioned to pilot the capability, running the kind of sophisticated, multi-creative, omnichannel HCP campaigns where creative-level NPI attribution makes a big difference. 

“Traditional campaign constructs did not allow us to deploy message journeys. Now we are able to both align our segment messaging and consider next best action at the provider level,” said Christine Tucco, Director of Digital Strategy at Salix Pharmaceuticals “We saw an opportunity to solve a clear gap in executing true omnichannel personalization, so we partnered early to help shape the solution. I would tell others that if they are serious about providing the right message in the right channel, leaning in early to innovations like this is critical.”

“Getting visibility into which creative messages HCPs were being served was essential to fueling our client’s omnichannel strategy, but achieving it the way we knew how would have disrupted our trafficking processes and conflicted with ad-serving best practices. When we shared that challenge with PulsePoint, they didn’t just listen. They solved it,” said Danielle Fox, Senior Integrated Planning Director at Butler/Till. “After iterating together to get it right, the resulting solution was easy to implement, saved us from quadrupling our trafficking needs, and gave us the content intelligence our client’s strategy demanded.”  

Ad Server Creative ID Reporting automatically stitches ad server creative IDs directly to NPI-level data within PulsePoint’s platform. The result is physician-level creative attribution that marketing teams can act on, understanding not just who was reached, but which message reached them, how they engaged, and what that means for how the brand communicates with that HCP going forward for true personalization and omnichannel success.

“Our clients are running campaigns of real sophistication with multiple creatives, multiple segments, multiple channels, and multiple platforms. Ad Server Creative ID Reporting is about interoperability and bringing the signals that live in ad servers like CM360 into PulsePoint’s physician-level data environment,” said Ezra Suveyke, Chief Product and Technology Officer at PulsePoint. “Marketers get the creative-level NPI attribution to match the complexity of how they’re actually running omnichannel campaigns and they get it without the manual lift that used to make that kind of insight cumbersome.”

Because Ad Server Creative ID data flows directly into PulsePoint’s Report Builder alongside existing campaign data, there are no new workflows to build. Teams can add the Ad Server Creative ID dimension to any existing report template and schedule delivery automatically. 

About PulsePoint

PulsePoint, a division of Internet Brands, is a leading advertising technology company dedicated to moving health marketing forward. We enable healthcare marketers to engage HCP and DTC audiences across all digital channels and best-fit environments. Powered by proprietary first-party data and methodology, PulsePoint’s platform drives measurable results for our clients, leading to better healthcare outcomes for all. For more information, visit pulsepoint.com.

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